Multilingual perspectives on Italian public healthcare websites

Starting from the 1990s, Italy, like other European countries, has been facing calls for greater local autonomy in its political institutions, including its public healthcare system. This has led to the devolution of healthcare services to each of its twenty administrative regions, which independently set up their own local health structures, or enterprises (It. transl. aziende sanitarie locali, Asl) and hospitalisation facilities. The entire process got refl ected at the formal level in the web-interfaces established by these local structures to reach out to their users/patients, thus sometimes producing non-homogeneous communicative approaches. This paper analyses all the Italian bi-/multilingual regional healthcare websites. This relevant identity-defi ning descriptor (bi-/multi-lingualism) can contribute to gaining insight into the way public healthcare institutions tackle the quite recent waves of immigrants from Eastern European, Far Eastern, North African and Arab countries to Italy. Results highlight the presence of few multilingual documents, especially in English. Most of these are linguistically accessible at a basic level, but show signifi cant ambiguities that can often prevent full or partial comprehension. There are mostly translations rather than original texts, which proves to be a frequent but debatable feature in Italian Asl communication.